Reptile & Amphibian Forums

Hey, I'm curious about something. I have a pair that I bred, and I got some babies that had kind of a zig zag to them. I was wondering if this is genetic, or if it's from something like stress when they were in the egg? I noticed some amazing zig zag snakes on www.cornsnake.net and I was wonderin' if I got one, would I be able to breed this pattern? Is it at all related to motley, hurricane, striped, and so on? I kind of understand the colors and all, but what about patterns? The two I bred were an anery and a snow, and I got some zig zag patterns. Any help would be great.

AJ

I think that zigzag is an interesting mutant and deserves as much attention as motley.

According to McEachern's corn snake color pattern booklet, zigzag is a recessive mutant gene. So if you get a couple of zigzags or heterozygous zigzags, you should be able to breed them and produce more zigzags. However, from what I have heard, the zigzag pattern is improved by selecting the better zigzags to breed from.

As to whether the snakes from your anerythristic x snow mating are zigzags, I don't know the answer. It's reasonably common to have two to four dorsal blotches run together in a sort of zigzag effect. As far as I know the cause is unknown, but the effect doesn't seem repeatable and is not what I'd call real zigzag.

McEachern says that zigzag and motley are independent mutants, with different locations in the corn snake genome. I've seen pretty good evidence that motley and striped are alleles, different variations of the same basic gene, with the same location in the corn snake genome. I don't have a handle on hurricane, yet. Hope this helps.

Paul Hollander